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Student puzzle-platformer plays with forced perspective

Aeroplanes are too heavy to fly, we all know, which is why a scientific ray shrinks them and their passengers down to the size of a bird. Look up in the sky and see for yourself. A plucky young group of student game developers understand this truth, and demonstrate it with a first-person puzzle platformer which shrinking and growing objects with forced perspective in ways that'll really twist a square's melon.

Aeroplanes are too heavy to fly, we all know, which is why a scientific ray shrinks them and their passengers down to the size of a bird. Look up in the sky and see for yourself. A plucky young group of student game developers understand this truth, and demonstrate it with a delightful first-person puzzle platformer which shrinking and growing objects with forced perspective in ways that'll really twist a square's melon.

Pillow Castle Games this week released a video showing off a "tech demo" for its yet-unnamed game, which shrinks the Statue of Liberty down to fit on a table and blows up the Mona Lisa to become a huge ramp. The video starts with the basics, introducing clever concepts along the way, like a fan's blast becoming more powerful as it's made bigger, plucking the moon out the sky, and using Portal-y portals to shrink the player too.

"'The Museum of Simulation Technology' is our playground we're using to wrangle our brains around using your perception as a weapon," Pillow Castle explains. The finished game may be quite different, then. Remember how different Portal was to the student game which inspired it, Narbacular Drop, though of course that team did have the benefit of being picked up by Valve.

A video's all we have to see of Pillow Castle's game right now, though if it gets you hankering for forced perspective fun, a few other games have dabbled in it. Games journo Christ Priestman pointed out Vince Mckelvie's Depth, which was made for the LA Game Space and comes in the pack of games you get for backing it, and Rat King's Tale of Scale, made in a Ludum Dare game jam and playable online for free. But enough about those, here's Pillow Castle's demo: